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European citizens - please write to your MEP urgently

ANH launches health claims campaign targeting Members of the European Parliament

PREVENT THE EU FROM RESTRICTING INFORMATION COMMUNICATING THE BENEFITS TO YOUR HEALTH AND WELLBEING OF FOOD AND NATURAL HEALTH PRODUCTS

Ask your Member of the European Parliament (MEP) to veto the proposed list of 220 authorised ‘general function’ health claims which will also simultaneously forbid all health claims that have not been scientifically proven to standards set by the controversial European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

Go to health claim veto campaign pages in English, French and German languages to find out more.

Why is it so urgent to act now?

Once this list is passed into law, around 2,500 commonly used claims about the health benefits of foods and food ingredients (health claims) will be banned. In the past, these health claims are likely to have made it easier for you to choose particular foods and food supplements to help manage your own health, or that of friends or family. By comparison, the marketplace used by future generations will contain only a very limited number of frequently repeated, generalised health claims. With such limited information available, it will be much harder to choose foods and natural health products based on their specific health benefits.

A majority vote in the European Parliament remains the only way to block the passage of the list into European law.

The implications for society — and future generations — are enormous if we allow this reduced, deeply deficient list of health claims to become law.

You have a fundamental right to the information that will help you to understand what you are eating and drinking; to give you the ability to make informed choices; and ultimately, to have control over your own health and wellbeing. Don’t let the EU take this away from you.

ANH launches health claims veto campaign in European Parliament

Last Friday, a short list of just 220 health claims was passed to the European Parliament for its scrutiny. Only two obstacles remain before the list becomes law. The first hurdle will be cleared if the Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) does not object to the proposed list. If a plenary vote taken by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) within 90 days is also positive, only these 220 health claims will be able to be used to indicate the beneficial value of commercial food and health food products across all 27 EU member states. Some 2,500 health claims that were rejected by the controversial Parma-based institution, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), will be banned within 6 months.

In response to this, Alliance for Natural Health International (ANH-Intl) has today launched a campaign aimed at informing MEPs – in particular, members of the ENVI committee – of the risks of accepting the ‘general function’ health claims list in its present form.

Calling on MEPs, ANH-Intl’s executive and scientific director, Robert Verkerk PhD, said: “MEPs, like European citizens, rightly want to ensure that misleading information is removed from the marketplace. But the inappropriate standards of proof of benefit required by European authorities mean that thousands of health claims, including such obvious examples as the effects of eating prunes on digestive health, have been thrown out. Also, evaluation of health claims for some groups of nutrients, such as botanicals and probiotics, has yet to be completed, so it would be premature to turn the proposed shortlist of 220 into EU law.”

ANH-Intl has released a campaign pack that provides MEPs with detailed reasons why it believes the ENVI committee members should object to the proposed list when it comes to an internal committee vote on 9th February. Additionally, ANH-Intl will ask European citizens across the EU to urge their MEPs to vote against the list when it is considered in a plenary session of the entire Parliament, following the 3-month European Parliamentary scrutiny period.

The most recent successful veto of a regulatory proposal was in May 2010, when the European Parliament blocked the authorisation of the meat glue thrombin in the EU.

Ends.

CONTACT

For further information, please contact: Robert Verkerk, PhD, ANH-Intl executive and scientific director

Alliance for Natural Health International is a non-governmental organisation dedicated to protecting and promoting natural and sustainable healthcare using the tools of ‘good science’ and ‘good law’. It is an international alliance of consumers, practitioners, doctors, scientists and lawyers, as well as specialist natural health enterprises, all with a common goal of optimising human health using, as far as possible, approaches that are compatible with human physiology and our genetic backgrounds. The World Health Organization, and other leading health authorities, have confirmed that the major burdens on healthcare systems the world over are now caused by largely preventable, chronic diseases. Since prevention of these diseases needs to be mediated largely through dietary and lifestyle changes, the EU’s Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation, and in particular its power to authorise and ban health claims, is of vital significance to European citizens’ ability to make informed choices over the foods and ingredients consumed.

ANH-Intl was established by sustainability scientist, Robert Verkerk PhD, in 2002, and Dr Verkerk remains its executive and scientific director.

Comments

your voice counts

It is time to stop the big companies from destroying our health only to earn money. The freedom of speech is our human right and cannot be taken away from us.

This law claims it is to protect people, but the only purpose is to protect the big companies from competition from companies working with real healing.

Lillianne
01 February 2012 at
11:30 pm

If we let this happen it would be yet another freedom of choice taken away from us, l for one and speaking as a former nurse, would much prefer to try natural remedies first before jumping head long into taking synthetic drugs, all of which have varing degrees of side effects, therefore l am fighting for me to be able to have freedom of choice.

j j murphy
02 February 2012 at
11:52 am

Hi, Thank you for getting this important information into the public domain, i will pass it on to my friends and get in touch with my MEP. Regards J J Murphy

Anonymous
04 February 2012 at
11:32 am

Hello,

Can anyone give me the email addresses of relevant bodies, politicians in the UK/Europe etc who I can send a generic letter to highlighting the absolute irresponsible, repungant business practices, pseudo science that is totally out of touch with the greatest living technology in existence - namely that of nature. It is totally unacceptable that bureucrats, greedy and deluded individuals who are absolutely blinded by non sensical, non holistic ideology and delusions. We must have freedom of choice. It is our body, our mind, our earth - look at the state of the physical health of most of these people making these decisions! Needless to say, their stale, flabby bodies and narcissisitc personal health behaviours represents their ability to think properly.

Any help with contact email addresses would be appreciated.

All the best everyone.

Dominic

ANH Admin
06 February 2012 at
5:10 pm

Hi Dominic, thanks for your comment. Probably the key people in the European Commission to contact on these issues are as follows:

The full list of Commissioners can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/ – we can’t say how many are likely to respond to a letter along the lines you suggest, however. Maybe pick the ones that look honest to you!

parents must fight doctors to recieve better medicine.and this makes my heart sad .doctors do not think for patient .this makes me sad .and now is the time for us to get best medicine .

juliei
12 February 2012 at
8:36 am

I am behind this completely. More people need to know about this and how it affects them. This is a very worthy cause, and one that I was first made aware of from <a href="http://www.wiktip.org/">wiktip.org</a&gt;. Since that time I have spread the word as much as I can.

Jennifleur
09 March 2012 at
12:03 pm

I'm a little bit confused. Is the proposed bill not good for consumers? It is ensuring that products being sold making health claims have research to back up their claims?

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